Meet Cynthia George, Ph.D. candidate
George is an innovative, tech-savvy Ph.D. candidate and an award-winning evaluator working at the national level to systemically improve both peer-to-peer education and school-based prevention programs. She is a systems-level thinker with significant real-world experience developing interventions, securing and managing grants, and guiding policy change initiatives. Her interest areas include theory, philosophy, methods and a range of individual and community level issues impacting health and safety such as food, lending and transportation justice.
George is a natural teacher who prefers andragogic and experiential approaches; and to teach courses related to social justice, theory, policy, macro practice, evaluation and research design. Her research agenda includes promoting public science through engaged methodologies. Most directly, she is working to improve infrastructure around evidence-based practices implemented as prevention programs. Indirectly, she hopes to better equip leaders to protect themselves and their communities in a world increasingly structured by big data.
Originally from Nashville, Tennessee, and a former teen leader herself, George’s dissertation, “Supporting teen leaders: Instrumentation to measure young driver safety,” serves the Tennessee Department of Transportation’s Governor’s Highway Safety Office in equipping its statewide network of teen leaders with web-based tools designed to empower teens to evaluate their own interventions. Specifically, her dissertation statistically validates and empirically refines a survey grounded in the Theory of Planned Behavior. A cell phone application has also been developed to support teens in conducting a seatbelt use observation study, which will work with the behavior survey measures and the county level teen crash rate to create a methodological triangulation; which web tools use to derive an evaluative composite change score.
Categories Faculty and staff, Students